Cyber-Knife II: Lady Cyber-Knife Read online

  Even through her enhancements and pain suppressors, Lady Cyber-Knife felt her vertebrae shake around as the Class Two drove her, face-first and into the ground, with every ounce of force it could muster. Immediately, it wrapped its four other limbs around her, and she felt great, crushing pressure applied to her entire body. She gritted her teeth; sparks shot out from beneath her metal incisors.

  Suddenly, a great rattling noise shook them, and the Class Two bounced around as though caught in a great earthquake. Lady Cyber-Knife felt pain radiating from her brain all the way down to her tailbone, as nerves that had no time to recover from their severe compression got traumatized again. As the buffeting continued, the Class Two's grip suddenly went loose, and Lady Cyber-Knife punched both her arms forward before she even knew what she was doing. Mechanical limbs that would have refused to budge a second ago flopped open obediently. Lady Cyber-Knife stood up, and saw gaping chunks torn out of her enemy's head and sides. She knew these kinds of wounds well, and expected the Class Two wouldn't rise again from them, but plunged the Cyber-Sword through its head, just to make sure. She looked up into the sky, flipping a quick salute to her air cover - Semi and her killer gun, specifically - which had come to her rescue once again.

  “Is that all of it?” Lady Cyber-Knife asked, turning in place ever so slowly and looking across every inch of the grass-topped horizon.

  “You wish,” Anwan's voice replied in her ear. “There's something just coming over that hill behind you.”

  “Would you care to identify it?” Lady Cyber-Knife said, completing one more half-turn before facing in the identified direction.

  “I wish I could,” Anwan said.

  “We've never seen it before!” Semi clarified. “You're going to have so much fun!”

  “If she were anyone else,” Winston added, “I'd say that maybe your definition of fun and hers weren't the same.”

  “All right, all right,” Tracy broke in. “We can't have a moment's calm without the three of you trying to fill it with your nonsense, can we? Anwan, how about you act useful and tell us what you know about that... new thing.”

  “Class Four?” Lady Cyber-Knife offered, adding every on-board sensor she had to the detection efforts already under way by the copter. Sure enough, it was hidden from view, but only intermittently detectible. If the ARNs had introduced a new generation of stealth technology to their forces, she was excited to cut enough of it away so as to render it unusable. “Unless they finally issued a real designation to those 'Class Unknowns,' then we could make it that.” She started walking across the field, towards the new mystery, though not too fast.

  “Not that we've seen,” Tracy said. “Anwan, make a note in the computer. Tag these things, 'Class Four.' Winston, let's go on ahead and see if we can't give Lady Cyber-Knife an idea of what she's in for.”

  “Aye, aye,” Winston said half-heartedly, as the copter tilted forward and sped on faster than Lady Cyber-Knife was inclined to follow. Its anti-gravity engines left a long trail of heat-disrupted air in its wake, and in less than a moment, it flew out of view.

  Lady Cyber-Knife tapped into the cameras dotting both the interior and exterior of the vehicle, slowing her pace even further as she watched the activity going on ahead of her. For a long half-minute, everything proceeded as normal; everyone quietly did their jobs and looked around attentively. Winston watched his controls, Semi spun her gun around in all directions, and Anwan routed every bit of information collected by his sensors back to the Complex, building a data archive of this heretofore unseen new threat.

  Then, with no warning, a a large, dark mass flickered into view on the copter's port side, taking up the entire field of vision of the camera nearest it. A loud creaking sound that seemed to start from the center of the planet and emerge skyward carried far enough that Lady Cyber-Knife heard it both over the surveillance footage and her own ears. She ran towards the source, but even she couldn't reach it before the Class Four, which easily stood seventy feet in the air, smashed into the copter.

  She saw it happen from every conceivable angle: an occasionally invisible tripod, its three great, jointed legs tilting around each other as it leaned away from the copter, its foremost leg lifting off the ground and spinning in a perfect circular arc behind and crashing down on the copter's tail. Tracy shouted an order to fire which Semi hadn't waited to hear. The main gun whined almost as loud as the ARN had roared; she swung it around, and bullets fired uselessly in the wrong direction for two long seconds before she got the Class Four in her crosshairs. Every shot she fired bounced off its armor as uselessly as sewing needles would have a Class One's casing.

  They didn't have long to shoot. Lady Cyber-Knife saw the copter's tail break off, and the eyes of her teammates go wide as they dropped out of the sky. The anti-gravity engines lost power immediately, and the craft didn't even have enough time to spit out any fire or smoke before it hit the ground, skidding across the dirt and collapsing inward before sliding to a stop. The power cut out, and all the cameras died. The Class Four took a great, authoritative step forward once it had reset its legs, intent on finishing off the job it had started. The wrecked copter bounced off the ground once as the ARN took another step, but looked otherwise like a bird that had died in mid-flight.

  Lady Cyber-Knife's vision went red, even though she hadn't called for any new visual filters. She had no interest in letting the Class Four do anything more than it had already done. She scrambled frantically up the hill, digging greater and greater divots in the soil with each desperate step, intent at least on exacting as much damage on the grass as the ARN had on her squadmates. She swung the Cyber-Sword in her right hand as she sprang into the air.

  From further away, the Class Four looked like three large legs pivoting around a central point, but as the airborne Lady Cyber-Knife approached it, she quickly came to see that each leg had three definite hinge joints - like knees, with protective caps surrounding them - and the point around which all three legs pivoted looked like a hexagonal dome, equally proportioned so that the eyes she imagined protected beneath the surface could look above and below with ease. As she extended the claws from her left hand, and dug into the perfectly smooth armor covering the Class Four, she vowed that it would never do anything with ease, ever again.

  Her claws skidded across the armor, unable at first to get a good grip, but it finally gave when she stabbed the Cyber-Sword into it. Lady Cyber-Knife swung in the air, her feet like a little pendulum. She kicked up and flipped on top of the sword, just below the middle joint on the leg. She punched above her head, again and again, trying furiously to crack the armor with just her hands, but it wouldn't give. When the Class Four began to twist around in protest, she wrapped her arms around the width of its limb, refusing to budge at all as she spun up in the air and swung all the way back down. As it began to steady itself, the knee joint above Lady Cyber-Knife bulged, and she saw the armor expand over the cap. She grabbed greedily at the surface once more, and it peeled back with an unanticipated obedience.

  She tore a piece of the armor, larger than her chest, clean off the Class Four's joint, the shrieking sound that came from the shredding metal a horrible enough noise that she could barely stand to hear it. Splinters of armor flew off along with it, and some cut across her face, deep enough to draw blood from beneath the skin. With one hand dug into the hole she'd freshly made, she threw the armor shard like an oversized shuriken at the central hub. It cracked with the impact, and pieces of armor began to drop away, like the drops of a deadly rainstorm. Lady Cyber-Knife withdrew the Cyber-Sword from now all-too-fragile towering thing's leg and leapt across to another limb, slashing upwards at its exposed weakness.

  As she cut into its brain, Lady Cyber-Knife barely avoided the gush of green and black chemicals that spewed from its injury. Immediately, the Class Four began to fail around her, joints going completely loose and limbs forfeiting their steadiness. The giant puppet's strings had been cut.

  The Class Four lilt
ed against the sky, and Lady Cyber-Knife felt a cold, sucking fear. Had she let her need to strike at the alien robot monster blind her to bad tactics? She detected some residual heat inside the copter, but she couldn't parse the readings from the damaged equipment well enough to tell if anyone was actually still alive. If some good fortune had smiled upon them, it would be a cruel trick of fate to survive the crash, but die smashed beneath the Class Four's carcass.

  Lady Cyber-Knife looked out over the ARN's leg, and had to zoom her vision in close to the ground to confirm she was seeing what she thought she saw. People had come running from the nearby settlement - the researchers from the White Zone - and brought along some of their equipment. They'd cut through the copter's side, and pulled Tracy, Winston, Anwan, and Semi out from the wreck. She didn't have to worry about desperately changing the angle of the Class Four's collapse any longer; she knew for certain that it would come down where she'd feared.

  The wind streaming through her hair, Lady Cyber-Knife held onto the ARN's leg. Her fingers and toes dug into cracks in its armor as it pitched forward, and she waited for the best possible moment to throw herself free. Its first knee joint hit the ground, and everything shuddered, but she hung on to her perch near the top. The second impacted shortly thereafter, and struck with such force that the third broke in two. Lady Cyber-Knife knew she'd received her cue, and launched herself free of the collapsing structure just as it began to roll over. She tucked her head into her chest and reached out with both hands, flipping onto her feet and running away as the Class Four broke what remained of the copter into tiny bits. The ground shook its hardest as the last member of the ARN forces on Earth-58008 fell and died.

  She caught up with the rescue team, and immediately saw how Semi and Winston had been crushed by the craft when it had come down; she hoped they had died quickly, their faces and chests barely resembling what they'd been in life. Anwan, she arrived just in time to watch him take his last breath, blood still gushing from the opening punched through his guts. But, Tracy, they had somehow survived, even as the cockpit had crushed everyone else. The rescuers had bound Tracy tightly to the floating gurney, immobilizing them against any further injury. Cracked bone stuck out of Tracy's wrists, their left leg had gotten twisted completely around above the knee, and something sharp had broken loose, cutting their face open across the nose, from cheek to cheek. At least the blood looked like it had begun to clot; it oozed, rather than seeped.

  “Do you have a surgeon here?" Lady Cyber-Knife asked a tall, dark-skinned woman, who'd limped up to her, dragging an artificial leg.

  “No, but we've called back to the White Zone for an evacuation. If she can hold out a little longer, she'll be fine,” the woman replied.

  “They,'” Lady Cyber-Knife corrected, looking at her broken commander.

  “I'm sorry?”

  “The major prefers gender-neutral pronouns,” Lady Cyber-Knife explained, looking directly into the woman's eyes. “They, their, them. Neutral pronouns.”

  “I apologize,” she said, holding up her hands and looking back and forth between Lady Cyber-Knife and Tracy, who still hadn't opened nir eyes. “I'm Sharon. I was a geologist -”

  Tracy coughed, wincing as ne tried to curl up on the gurney, but wasn't able to. “Don't... don't worry about it.”

  “Major, I take responsibility for this,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, kneeling down.

  “You couldn't do anything,” Tracy replied.

  “I should have known to rescue you,” Lady Cyber-Knife explained. “I just felt such anger for what the Class Four had done to you. I would have done anything to stop it, even sacrificed myself.”

  “We're friends, idiot,” Tracy said, trying to smile through broken teeth and torn lips. “You felt like that because we're friends.”

  “I have no friends,” Lady Cyber-Knife said, without even thinking.

  “You're alive, aren't you?” Tracy asked, as ne tried to take Lady Cyber-Knife's hand in nir own. Tracy was so weak that ne couldn't even lift nir hand, so Lady Cyber-Knife had to complete the gesture. “You're alive. You need friends.”

  Lady Cyber-Knife didn't know what to say, so it was fortunate that a medical evacuation team, deployed straight from the White Zone, came running out of the encampment and carted Tracy away first, then the rest of the bodies, without saying a word. The rescuers milled about. Sharon even looked like she wanted to say something. They all left Lady Cyber-Knife alone, with only the Cyber-Sword to keep her company.

  Lady Cyber-Knife held the sword out in front of her, like a mirror, and took a long look at the wounds she'd suffered on her face. As expected, they had begun to close, but the bullets from Semi's gun had cut so deep that she could watch herself heal in real time. She caught glimpses of something shining underneath her cheek, something not bone. She knew that what remained of her skeleton had been reinforced with military-grade alloys, to keep it from breaking, but she hadn't ever seen what that looked like. Lady Cyber-Knife held out her thumb, middle finger, and index finger on her free hand, and reached into the wound, holding it open, and pulling it apart. She wanted to see what lay underneath; she was curious.

  Below her skin and muscle, she didn't see what she'd expected. There was no bone at all, only metal. She pulled the tissue apart further, expecting that all she'd have to do was expand the wound until she saw bone. She had to see it, today. She had to see some sign that she wasn't just what General Dinesh, the Complex, and MOM had told her she was. Lady Cyber-Knife had to know that she, even in just a small way, was alive.

  She tore apart her cheek, from her eye socket down to her chin, from her mouth to her earlobe, but didn't see any sign of what she'd hoped. Whatever Tracy saw in her, she didn't see in herself.

  CHAPTER 6

  EARTH-7331, DETENTION THE PRESENT

  Lady Cyber-Knife walked out of the cavern and through a wide, round doorway. The door's frame was wide; it would be more than a foot thick, when it slid out of the wall. She entered a clean, grim tunnel with high ceilings. She had barely left the bodies of the guards behind before a shriek echoed through the lowest level of the prison. Her cybernetic ears cut out almost immediately, but even the initial blast packed enough of a punch to give her pause.

  “Are you having fun yet, you miserable bitch?” an electronically-distorted voice asked, coming from speakers in the ceiling.

  “Who is that?” Lady Cyber-Knife snapped, scanning around to identify the source of the signal. “Identify yourself!” She looked around, at the eggshell color surrounding her, the white tile underneath her feet, which had replaced the stone and dirt just outside. She saw little slots in the walls, at about eye level, spaced equally apart. Two rows of them, she could see, in fact, but no doors.

  Laughter answered her, an arrogant, self-satisfied sound that started softly, and grew loud quickly. “It only takes a little elevator ride for you to forget me? You've wounded me.”

  Lady Cyber-Knife's lip twitched in frustration as she recognized the warden's voice, the metal curving sharply underneath her nose. She punched the wall and buried her arm in it up to her elbow. When she tore it free, plaster and paint sprayed in every direction. “Congratulations on surviving your retreat, warden,” she said. “How much longer will you, I wonder, once our masters understand the degree of your blunder?”

  His laughter didn't stop entirely, but it became more muted, and deeper. “You haven't won yet, Lady Cyber-Knife,” the warden said.

  “And yet, I have fought and destroyed every obstacle you put in my way, be they organic, or artificial,” she replied.

  “Few have ever designed a prison to keep people out, now,” the Cyber-Sword chimed in.

  “If you had the ability to move on your own, would you and I still be on the same side?” Lady Cyber-Knife asked, glaring down at the sword.

  “Nobody's ever approved of an answer to a hypothetical question,” the warden said, sounding rather entertained by the argument unfolding.

  “I have a policy: I do
n't answer them,” the Cyber-Sword said.

  Lady Cyber-Knife's unburdened hand trembled in her irritation. “And yet,” she said, “I suspect we both know what you would say.”

  The warden coughed into his microphone, sending a powerful shriek of feedback through the speakers. “Speaking of futile enterprises,” he said, before the sound had a chance to die down, “your incursion into my facility stops, here and now. If you surrender peacefully, I may even assign you to a cell by your friend. That way, you might actually feel like you accomplished something.”

  “Please, tell me how you intend to do that,” Lady Cyber-Knife replied. “Certainly not with your words.”

  “Unless you do,” the Cyber-Sword added, “in which case, stop speaking immediately!”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” the warden said, the sound of his fingers tapping on his desk carrying over the microphone. “Deeds, not words, will be your end, you are exactly right. Now, you've heard it said that the enemy of your enemy is your friend? I know you have. Just as often, the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy. See for yourself!”

  All around them, Lady Cyber-Knife and the Cyber-Sword heard the chorus of electronic locks holding shut the doors of the nearby prisoners snap open. Doors, hidden with exacting precision against the walls around her, slid away, revealing four dark cells, barely larger than an office cubicle. The two furthest away from her stepped out first: a large man with a blue mechanical eye and what looked like no neck, and another man with a shaved head and a long nose, who was thin everywhere his neighbor from across the hall was fat. “On your left, you'll see Moses Wenceslaus, originally from Earth-8311. He thought he could lead a revolution against the Complex. He hid from us for two years, but we caught him, and put him in a box, after making him watch as we stripped every layer of atmosphere from his planet. Across from him is Thurston Bekmambetov, a native of the White Zone. He decided that having his life's every whim catered to wouldn't satisfy him. So, he hacked computers, shut down transdimensional doorways, injected pornographic videos into official Complex computers, and generally imperiled the soldiers serving to keep him safe. We injected him with a parasite that absorbs ninety percent of the nutrition he consumes before he can digest any of it. Now, he understands the burden of a malicious leech.”